Playing Soccer in Augmented Reality

The RoboCup community has showed enormous progress in both their real robot and simulation leagues. Yet, a significant gap exists between the agent behaviors created for real and simulated worlds. In the Rescue community this lead to the introduction of the Virtual League, a realistic simulation of a disaster scenario where models of existing robots has to steered trough. In the Soccer League this resulted in the introduction of the Physical Visualization League, where small robots follow the directions of agents in a 3-D simulation. The agents play soccer with a virtual ball; the location of the virtual ball is projected on the field between the small robots. This Physical Visualization League mixes reality and simulation through an Augmented Reality environment. This Augmented Reality makes it possible to quickly change the field, and explore other real world applications with mini-robots.

The challenge of 2007 will be to learn the movement model of the Eco-Be mini-robot, so the robots accurately follow the directions of the 3-D agents. After that, the movement model of a ball has to learned, such that playing with a real ball can be demonstrated. An overview camera that is tracking robots and ball can generate the reinforcement signal.

The progress of the research can be demonstrated at the WorldCup 2007 in Atlanta.

Keywords:
robotics, multi-agents, machine-learning.
Study:
Artificial Intelligence
Contact:
Arnoud Visser
Location:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
References:
Physical Visualization League